Billions of years ago, a Maltusian scientist named Krona, performed a forbidden experiment in an effort to see the origin of the universe. His irresponsible actions disrupted the process of cosmic creation, resulting in an additional, opposite universe.

Now, there are a few important inhabitants of this universe, the main ones we’ll be focusing on are:

So, history lesson! We go back to the 60s, and when DC first established the Multiverse, mainly so they could say the heroes of the Golden Age were on Earth-Two and have team-ups. These stories are collected under the loose banner of Crisis on Multiple Earths and for our purposes important for two reasons. Firstly, they established that if there was an Earth-Two there must be more, leading to Earth-Three and the first appearance of the evil analog of the Justice League calling itself the Crime Syndicate.

The original Crime Syndicate

Secondly for an odd story about The Anti-Matter Man who came from the Anti-Matter universe to try and destroy the main DC Earth and Earth-Two at once! Both were basically just excuses to have the Justice League and the golden age Justice Society team up.

The (really odd looking) Anti-Matter Man

Now things get a little more complicated. Because of numerous reboots, retcons, multiverse destroying/creating crises and more things have changed over the years. During Crises on Infinite Earths (1985) we meet a single Monitor, and his evil counterpart, the Anti-Monitor, but then the former died and whole dimensions – including the one including the original Earth-Three mentioned above – were destroyed by the latter during Crises on Infinite Earths. The Multiverse was eventually properly destroyed/merged during the Infiite Crises (2005) as a direct result of stuff that happened in Crises on Infinite Earths, including the remains of the Anti-Monitor!

Hilariously, the only pic I could find of the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor together

52 Monitors

With the creation of the new 52 multiverses at the end of the weekly series 52 (2006, and unrelated to the current ‘New 52’ reboot) we saw that each of these realities now had a Monitor, known creatively as The Monitors, and the Anti-Monitor was ‘reborn’. The thing is though, we still only saw one Ant-Monitor. Did the creation of 52 new realities result in 52 ‘Anti-realities’ as well? As far as I know it’s just conjecture and the Anti-Monitor as seen through his long history of messing with the Universe is the only one of his kind.

During the time between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crises is when Morrison introduced us to the Crime Syndicate from the Antimatter univese, known as The Crime Syndicate of Amerika, and distinct from the original Earth-Three version that the Anti-Monitor destroyed. It makes a kind of sense – we had Earth-Three as basically the ‘evil’ version of our Universe, but now the Antimatter universe served that same purpose.

Awww, look at their little tough faces – aren’t they adorable?

So, what does this mean for the New 52, and why haven’t you actually answered my questions??

Well, a few things. In the New 52 we already know that the Crime Syndicate come from Earth 3, as seen in Forever Evil. We also have Nix Uaton, the last of the Monitors, appearing in Morrison’s Multiversity series, so Monitors etc were still a thing in the New 52.

The new (New 52) Crime Syndicate, once again from Earth 3

How does the Anti-Matter universe fit in the multiverse? is it just one of the 52?

So far, we don’t know. It used to be seperate but as Multiversity goes through and reveals all these various dimensions maybe one of them will be the Antimatter universe. We just don’t know.

or is the Matter-Antimatter pair one universe from this perspective?

It used to be but as I said – ever since the establishment of a universe of 52 earths its been a bit weird. The multiverse used to be infinite with one Monitor that existed outside of it so one Anti-Monitor made sense. With each reality getting a Monitor that became more blurry. It wasn’t ever addressed since 52 (as far as I know) and the world of the New 52 could really go either way.

It has nothing to do with the Earth-3 universe, right?

As I said, there are inherent history connections between the two as they’re both riffs on the idea of a dark mirror or evil universe, and both at times have been home to the Crime Syndicate, but the Earth 3 of the New 52 is not the Antimatter Universe…

BUT

The ‘Big Bad’ that destroyed Earth 3 and sent the Crime Syndicate to the Prime Earth/Earth-0 was the Anti-Monitor, just like how it destroyed the old counterpart Earth-Three in Crises on Infinite Earths! We haven’t got much of the New 52 version of the Anti-Monitor (hence why that wiki is so short) but there have basically been two important, brief, appearances: